(*This story was updated at 4:49 p.m. on Monday, April 22, 2024 to include comments from state Senate President Karen Spilka.)
A conservative activist group has called on Gov. Maura Healey’s top transportation official to step down for floating a proposal to toll drivers entering Massachusetts from out of state as a way to pay for the state’s infrastructure needs.
The call, by the Boston-based Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, came as other ramped up their criticisms of state Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt, who made her comments during a keynote speech on April 10 with the advocacy group Walk Massachusetts.
“Government should never be used as a weapon against the people. People that view taxation and our government as a weapon to be used against individuals they don’t like are a critical danger to our democracy and people rightly lose confidence in any public official who thinks that way,” spokesperson Paul D. Craney said in a statement.
“Massachusetts families are struggling right now. The cost of living in our state is skyrocketing and inflation is devaluing people’s wages and savings at a record clip. The poor economic policies of the last several years are causing people and wealth to leave our state at an unprecedented level,” Craney continued.
On Monday, Democrat Healey distanced herself from Tibbits-Nutt’s comments, saying in a statement that her remarks “do not represent the view of this administration, and to be clear, I am not proposing tolls at any border.”
On Monday, the Fiscal Alliance said it had launched a campaign “calling on the public to write to their elected officials on Beacon Hill to tell them that Secretary Tibbits-Nutt needs to go.”
In a separate statement, the Massachusetts Republican Party called Tibbits-Nutt’s remarks “an abhorrent display of bad policy, and showed blatant disrespect for Massachusetts residents.”
The proposal is “the antithesis of what’s needed in Massachusetts,” state GOP Chairperson Amy Carnevale said, pointing to a recent analysis by the research arm of the Boston Foundation showing that people are leaving the Bay State “in droves.”
“Adding more taxes, more tolls, and more penalties for ordinary Massachusetts residents is only going to make Massachusetts less affordable, and add to the mass migration the Commonwealth has been experiencing,” Carnevale said.
In her address to Walk Massachusetts, Tibbits-Nutt mused aloud on the challenges the state faces in “[keeping] people safe in all the many ways we need to keep them safe,” and wondered how it could be done " in an equitable manner.”
“This comes back to funding. We talk about this all the time. We’re broke. I literally said that in a budget meeting today, I’m like, we’re poor,” Tibbits-Nutt said in a video of the speech posted to the Walk Massachusetts website.
“So what are we going to do about that? We’ve gotta get aggressive,” Tibbits-Nutt continued. “I’m going to talk about tolling … And when I’m talking tolling, I’m talking at the borders, I’m not talking like within Massachusetts.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu weighed in with comments to the Boston Herald: “Looks like Massachusetts has found yet another way to unnecessarily take your money. All the more reason for more Massachusetts residents to make the permanent move to New Hampshire.”
At least one top Democrat in the Massachusetts State House appeared open Monday to a discussion about the state’s highway tolling system.
Speaking to reporters after an unrelated event Monday, state Senate President Karen Spilka, D-Middlesex/Norfolk, whose district includes a swath of the Massachusetts Turnpike, noted that her constituents are more often subject to tolls than other Bay State residents.
“I live in Metro West where we have had tolls for many, many years to pay for a project that not many of my constituents actually use on a day to day basis. I believe that -- and I’ve said this publicly -- if tolls are such a great idea for the Turnpike, we should look at them for funding for other areas of the state,” Spilka said, according to State House News Service.
“I have filed, in the past, bills to put tolls at the border. So I do believe that we need to be creative about our funding. And I do believe that it needs to be fair, because I believe the tolls system right now is not fair at all,” Spilka said after addressing the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. “So I would certainly be willing to have discussions about creative and fair ways to raise revenues for our many infrastructure needs.”
Previous MassLive reporting was included in this story.